Holmes Media

There are so many things I would love to say right now.  It’s the end of an era, not the best era in browsers, but an era none-the-less.  Now with many major sites such as YouTube and Facebook denouncing Internet Explorer 6, we’d like to thank IE 6 for the many improvements it brought to the browser world and try to forgive it for all of the hours spent debugging CSS, JavaScript and other web components that worked perfectly in every other browser but not in IE6.

Today CNN is running this article in commemoration – http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/04/ie6.funeral/index.html?hpt=T2

To those non-techies out there wondering what the significances of this death has on the web design world; I’d like to give a quick analogy.  Picture being a school teacher, and you gear your lesson plans all morning and night for the classroom.  During the summer you spend hundreds of hours making new lesson plans, fun games, and things you think will be great for the entire class.  But once the school year starts, you have 1 student, lets call him (sorry girls) “Earl”.  Everyone in the class sits down quietly in the morning, listen well, take notes but then there is Earl.  Earl makes noises in the classroom, can’t sit still, makes bad jokes during class and in general makes my life 100 times harder then it needs to be.

So you ask what is the significance?  Today, Earl has graduated out of your class after 5 years of flunking (I couldn’t bare kill off Earl), and now your lesson plans work for the whole class.  Work is enjoyable again and you can go back to better days when you didn’t ponder killing students or becoming a lumber jack so that you never had to hear about bratty kid disrupt you again.

While I am overjoyed at IE6 leaving us, I have to admit,  it was much better then it’s previous sibling.  RIP Internet Explorer 6!